Amazing Civil War gunship continues life as an artifact / Turret raised from the deep stars in museum

Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 4, 2003

2003-12-04 04:00:00 PDT Newport News , Va. -- Inside the turret of the Civil War gunship Monitor, it is dank and dripping and slimy. Water seeps from overhead and sloshes around the rusted metal underfoot. Gray mud clogs the mouths of the two massive guns. And a century's worth of encrustation clings to every angle.

It feels like an awful place to die: Everything is upside down, which is the way the ship went to the bottom more than a century ago, and the way the 200-ton turret was hauled from off Cape Hatteras last year and brought here for conservation.

Amid the tangle of girders, antique pulleys, toppled gun carriages and slabs of iron as thick as books, it's hard to tell what's what, except for the dent in the side where the turret's iron hide is buckled like a soda can.

On March 9, 1862, not far from Newport News, in Hampton Roads, as the Monitor's guns heaved 180-pound cannon shot at the Confederate warship known in the North as the Merrimack, an incoming round struck the turret, stove in the iron and bounced off. The sound inside -- iron on iron -- can only be imagined.

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The Monitor and the Merrimack. The words have a cheery ring, like something from a furniture catalog. History books bear quaint etchings of the Civil War fight, the first ever between ironclad warships. Today the Monitor- Merrimack Memorial Bridge-Tunnel carries an interstate highway across Hampton Roads, one of the world's great anchorages.

The historic battle there was a draw. The Confederate vessel, technically the Virginia, a salvaged Union ship formerly known as the Merrimack, was armed with 10 heavy guns, and also sheathed in iron. The day before the Monitor arrived in Hampton Roads, the Virginia had sunk one of the Union's wooden warships blockading the harbor and set a second one ablaze, killing 240 Union sailors.

The two ships fought all morning, often at point-blank range. The Monitor was the more nimble, the Virginia more of a heavyweight. The southern vessel tried to ram and board the northern ship, but the Monitor was too quick. The Monitor's big guns took a toll on the Virginia, battering its iron sides. The Monitor withdrew to shallow water after its skipper was wounded, and after awaiting its return for an hour, the Virginia returned to port.

Neither ship did the other serious harm. No one on either side was killed.

But neither vessel survived 1862. In May, the Confederates burned the Virginia in the face of the Union Army's spring campaign. Seven months later, the ship that saved the Union sank in a gale, trapping 16 sailors from a crew of 63. By war's end both had passed into the mist of national lore.

Today, Curtiss Peterson, a mustachioed senior conservator at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, stands in a hard hat, T-shirt, jeans and rubber boots on the lip of the Monitor's upturned turret as it sits in a storage tank behind the museum.

"It's an endless series of puzzles," he says. Below him, three other curators wearing hard hats and goggles, rubber boots and rubber gloves, stand with hoses, pickaxes and cameras. Historians know the basics about the turret's construction, but there are many details that remain a mystery, still caked in rust, decaying boiler coal and petrified sea crud.

The Monitor was one of the most innovative warships ever built. The revolving armored turret was the first instance in which a ship's guns could be aimed at the enemy, independent of the ship's maneuvering. The Monitor's turret, 9 feet tall and 21.5 feet in diameter, was set like a barrel on the flat deck and gave the ship what has become perhaps the most recognizable profile in the annals of the U.S. Navy.

The fact that the Monitor's turret -- guns included -- is even present seems incredible.

After sinking in December 1862, the ship lay undiscovered in 260 feet of water for the next 111 years. Several eras in naval history passed, along with two cataclysmic wars. During World War II, the wreck was mistaken for a German submarine and depth-charged.

In 1973 the wreck was found by a research ship. Almost 30 years later, on Aug. 5, 2002, in a stupendous feat of nautical engineering and archaeology, the turret was extracted from the wreckage by the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was dragged up, brimming with mud, guns and the bones of two Yankee sailors, and brought to Newport News.

The Mariners' Museum, one of the nation's finest nautical museums, is raising funds for a huge $30 million Monitor Center. It will house the turret and other artifacts that were recovered from the ship, or may be recovered in the future. But for now, the turret is immersed in a 90,000-gallon tank filled with an alkaline solution that has a low-voltage current running through it to prevent more decay. The octagonal tank, which takes a day to drain, must be emptied for the conservators to do their work.

Curator Tony Randolph said working inside was humbling. "Your hands shake a lot," he said. "It's a very important national treasure, and you really have to take it slowly and appreciate every day what's going on."

The Monitor was built in a hurry, in response to word that the Confederacy was far advanced on the construction of the Virginia, which had the potential to destroy the Union's wooden fleet. The Monitor was armed with only two guns, but the revolving turret was designed to maximize the efficiency of its firepower.

The guns fired through two side-by-side gun ports that were protected by coffin-shaped sliding iron doors, or port stoppers. Peterson has been most fascinated by learning how things worked in the turret. The conservators discovered to their surprise that each stopper could only swing along the inside of the wall, toward the other port.

"That meant you could not open both gun ports at the same time," he says, "so you could not fire both guns at the same time. It was known that they did not run out more than one at the same time, but now we know that they could not."

This was probably some comfort to the crew of 20 men packed into the turret, who only had to worry about staying clear of one firing gun at a time, Peterson says. Had anyone been in the way of a recoil, "you will just be noise and grease if it hits you."